First Blood
by sf
Summary: Pull the trigger... and change your life forever. A Sanzo PoV. (Complete; minor angst.)


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First Blood -- by sf**  
**Status : Complete, one shot  
Date : Nov 02 02

Notes :   
Staggering around with a headache from strong coffee, a rainy day, and wet hair. Oh, and angst by the truckload. Just another of those stupid, boring perspective fics about nothing very much in particular. There isn't even very much point. Sanzo-centric. Bad punning and imagery and more implied than said. I can just see 13 year old literature students dissecting this. *shudders*

This fic is disjointed, because I'd personally expect Sanzo to be mentally disjointed in a situation like this. Shock, you know.

Usual disclaimers apply. 

Warnings :   
No particular point, no particular anything, just a totally _blah_ ficlet to match a totally _blah_ mood. 

His hands had trembled, just that slightest bit.

It was nothing, he told himself. It was adrenaline. It was the weight of the Smith and Wesson, a weight that he hadn't yet accustomed himself to. The weight of a weapon never designed to be held by the hands of a thirteen year old.

It was the sudden flashback, seeing glowing youkai eyes heading for him. It was the sudden memory of his master, seeing his face in the shadow and the light even as he hesistated... as he had hesistated then.

There had been no one to dive in front of him this round, but there had been the gun in his hands, and that was all he needed.

He had seen it again with his heartbeat counting out each frame -- the youkai, the rain, the blood. The death. The disaster. And his finger had curled around the trigger and pulled back, and there was blood on him again, trailing down his face, trailing across his hands, trailing across his robes.

And as before, there was silence, and a corpse at his feet. 

He lowered the smoking gun, willing his hands not to shake, willing his mind not to draw parallels between this ... and _that._ The former was easy. The latter .. not so. But this was different. This was youkai, this was not the man he had loved and admired and sworn to follow. This was payback, this was revenge, this was... _Gods_, he didn't know what this was. He hadn't killed the miserable creature because he _wanted_ to. He'd killed it because .. it was in his way.

Revenge would have meant feeling something. Revenge would have meant a sense of accomplishment, of satistfaction, of fulfillment, but he didn't... hadn't... _couldn't_ feel anything now, with his heart racing in his chest and the gunshot still ringing in his ears. 

His hands had trembled. He was sure of that now.

With this death, this one bullet, this one act of pulling the trigger, he'd killed not just a youkai, but any chance of following in his master's footsteps. His master had been all a Sanzo should have been -- learned, enlightened, guiltless. His master had no blood on his hands. His master had been the guardian of the _Seiten Kyomen_, while he... he who stood in this world of shadows, bloodied, battered, alone... he was the one who bore the _Maten Kyomen_. The sutra of darkness, as his master's had been of the light.

But now he was alive, while his master was not....

It was not revenge, he told himself; he would not honor his master's memory by mapping a trail of blood in its wake. It was self-preservation. It was necessity. It was.. all a damned bad excuse.

Blood all over his hands, etching trails as the droplets were dragged down by gravity.

The gods saved nobody, not him, not his master, not the ones who stood in his way.

It had started, and the future revealed itself to him at last -- a future of darkness and bloodshed and death, winding its long course towards a conclusion that was lost in the gloom. Death and darkness, that was the road he had chosen for himself, while he left his master somewhere in the past and somewhere in the light. This was the road he had stepped on, and now there was no turning back.

This was the road he would take -- _alone._ From today, he lived only for himself.

His hands had trembled, but they would not, the next time. And there would be a next time, he was sure of it.

For now, he tucked the gun into his sleeve. Stepped over the corpse and continued down the road, leaving bloody tracks. He never looked back, never saw Kinzan temple burning in the distance, never saw what became of those he had left behind. His eyes were set forward on the road ahead, on the distant lights of the nearest village, and somewhere in the future ... on the eventual recovery of the _Seiten_ sutra. 

Taken that way, he was, in a way, looking for the light.

There was blood on his hands and blood in his wake... but blood could always be washed away.

__

I shall be saying this with a sigh,  
Somewhere ages and ages hence :   
Two roads diverged in a yellow road And I --   
I took the one less travelled by,   
And that has made all the difference.  
-- Robert Frost, 'The Road Not Taken'


End file.
